Extraterrestrial Life Found?

A new report by a NASA scientist suggests that fossil bacteria have been found in a rare meteorite.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth... In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to search the stone’s surface for evidence of fossilized remains.

He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot -- here on earth, that is.

A scanning EM photo of a CI1 meteorite (right) and the giant bacterium Titanospirillum velox (left).

Color me as skeptical.  Rocks are full of all kinds of weird little shapes that got there by all kinds of processes that don't necessarily include living organisms.  Considering the proposed origin of the Cl meteorites, it would seem to me to unlikely that bacteria would be floating around in space in the outer reaches of the early solar nebula to be trapped and included in the meteorite.

CI group - This group, named after the Ivuna meteorite, have chemical compositions that are close to that measured in the solar photosphere, neglecting gaseous elements. In this sense, they are chemically the most primitive known meteorites. They typically contain a high proportion of water (up to 22%), and organic matter in the form of amino acids and PAHs. Aqueous alteration promotes a composition of hydrous phyllosilicates, magnetite, and olivine crystals occurring in a black matrix, and a possible lack of chondrules. It is thought they have not been heated above 50 °C (122 °F), indicating that they condensed in the cooler outer portion of the solar nebula.